https://www.androidpolice.com/youtubes-war-against-third-party-apps-is-ridiculous/
YouTube's cat-and-mouse game against third-party apps only ensures more people will dislike the company
I create content that goes into YouTube. I generate a tiny bit of revenue from that. I have no say into how YouTube treats my viewers. If you watch the ads, awesome, I get some money. If not, I'm just glad you watched the video.
The majority of content on the platform is made up of channels my size and smaller. Most of us are getting paid pennies.
But YouTube doesn't care about us. They want to appease the larger studios.
Youtube doesn't care about the collective "you" that is its namesake. It hasn't for over a decade. Itps all about the big studio level productions. It's no better than the mainstream television networks at this point.
Maybe its due to my age, but I use YT for tutorials on diy or fixing shit. I get 20s in, then whammo, ad. Just as the guy is focusing in on the area I need to see. I am watching a 5min video and 2min of ads.. it is ridiculous.
Don’t forget that if you have to rewind a part to see something the creator blew past that you needed to see and you get another two ads. Fuck that noise.
I think you've got the right approach, FWIW.
Not sure that big business favouritism is the intent, but it's definitely more lucrative for them. Especially with Vimeo and other alternatives out there.
I remember when streaming took off in a big way - some on YT and others on justin.tv (later Twitch and now Amazon's Twitch) - and I thought you'd have to be objectively bonkers to rely upon an opaque and ever-changing algorithm for your financial future. Some have gamed it well, but it's pretty easy to see how they've survived - fake shock/reaction content, alt-light or worse content, polarising opinion, thinly-veiled advertorials, and so on.
I’d argue that there are a couple of studios that are still mostly focusing on making good content, not click bate.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I think YouTubers like MKBHD are generally playing it straight. Trying to stay on top by getting better and better content.
Although, these people tend to burnout eventually. They have to keep running a faster mile.
I definitely admire the integrity and the effort.
But, economically speaking, you get what you incentivise for: if you can game the system and get the click/eyeball ratio, then they're going to do that.
Yeah, I’m just saying that some exceptions break through. Some YouTubers make content that is so good that people outside of YouTube consistently share the shit out of it. They don’t need the click bate for the initial boost, they get the boost from sharing off the platform.
Patreon and Merch ALSO allow a lot of youtubers to survive without having ro rely on Monetization from Youtube
They need to separate out the sites, big budget dailies and content creators, your run of the mill every day creators and a video uploading site.
Theyncant be all things, simultaneously pushing shorts and videos over 15 minutes.
On my browser, they blocked recommended videos. Lol. Now I use FreeTube. Anything like that happen to you?
Were you logged in? The site doesn't recommend videos for anyone not logged in anymore.
They still do on my other browsers when you start watching videos.
In my main browser, they took out the entire Explore section so I can't even see what's trending. Lol.
And this is the problem with YouTube. The UI is awful and they keep degrading the experience
This just in, people don’t like ads. At all. Most people.
It is time to find a new business model that works. I’m not smart enough to know what that is so that you don’t piss off users, but whoever figures it out will be a billionaire.
They want people to pay for premium. That’s why they’re pushing more ads. To make the free plan insufferable.
Back in the early days of youtube, I didn't mind them. Just a few ads here and there. Nowadays, the internet is barely usable unless you have an adblocker.
How about a cryptominer that runs while watching videos, that would surely be a great idea :D
/s
I would pay for premium IF it was a reasonable price.
I don't want shitty music bundled or whatever fuck else they are calling it now JUST youtube.
AND here's the big one, I want the fucking downvote count back and sponsor skip. Most videos have ads and fucking sponsor segments which are also fucking ads. I'm not paying to watch that.
And downvote count is absolutely crucial to be able to detect bullshit videos quickly.
Google is offering a shit product and asking a premium price. Fuck em.
I don't mind ads in the sidebar or on that little banner across the bottom of the screen sometimes. Its when the ads completely cover the content I'm trying to watch/view and/or start auto playing at obnoxious volume that I get annoyed. (Also fuck people on metered connections right?)
The two hour long ads that try to act like they match the title of the video are horrible.
The trouble with YT Premium is how much they’re charging for it.
We used a VPN to get Ukrainian family YTP for a fraction of the price they charge here in the UK. We pay something like £4 a month now for both of our accounts. That would be the better part of £20 a month if we’d done it legit. Fuck that noise.
Sure, it comes with YT Music, but I’ve literally never used that. I have Apple Music and an iPod. So £20 a month JUST TO REMOVE ADS.
Nah, fuck ‘em.
That is absolutely a solution. But what I’m talking about is a way to monetize while keeping the service free but without showing ads.
This is the billion dollar idea. If not trillion.
There is no such thing as a free service.
People need to eat, bills need to be paid, shelter needs to be provided and unless people can have these at no expense and create things for pure passion & share for others to enjoy then they need the means to pay for these things.
The internet has whittled this down to a few basic models:
If you could find a way to do anything without having to pay for our human needs then would it be a trillion dollar idea or would money be meaningless now when people wouldnt need it to live & enjoy their lives?
I pay for YouTube and use FreeTube and NewPipe. I try to pay for whatever services I use. I think this is the way, either pay or let the ads play. I do this because the YouTube app is trash for many reasons mostly having to do with trying to funnel me to the money making bits.
There are greedy corporations making the user experience worse and doing everything they can to wring every penny they can. Ultimately, I attribute this to the wall street investor model. A company can be making money and still be losing because their revenues shrank from the prior quarter. That is a broken system that will only eat itself. That being said, people gotta eat and that includes the janitors, etc.. at Google.
Point is, its a mixed bag. There are people on the other end making the product you are using, AND there is a soul sucking company making it worse for both their customers and their workers/creators. To be clear, there is something to be said about how poorly Google supports their creators. In many ways, they are taking advantage of the creators that use their platform. How is it that Google is making so much money in ads, but creators have to open Patreons?
I still don't think we should just expect stuff for free.
Tangentially, I need to be better about helping support the open source projects I use, especially the smaller maintainers, to be honest, but I do send to a few and I encourage everyone to do so as well as much as they can.
edit: Grammar
There is no such thing as a free service.
But there is such a thing as a monopoly.
Where are the youtube competitors that keep prices competitive?
The credit card companies should have invested heavily in micropayments. If I could just pay a tiny non subscription fee for a bit of media I would do that in a heartbeat.
Ads aren't to bad, I watch them on TV. The problem is the targeted ads and surveillance
For those wondering, ReVanced launcher short after that and is even better than Vanced.
It is faster, doesn't crash and you can read the answers to all comments. It lacks some features of NewPipe like the display dimming via swipe, but has some UI advantages (sharing without timestamp, you pain in the ass!).
New version of newpipe can already do that tho, glad that these projects are giving each other inspiration to work on the features that user want, unlike certain company
The API feels faster for me than newpipe but its a PWA. pewpipe's UI is native to android, feels easier to use.
Google's a dumb ass company and I strongly suspect them to be Americas replacement to the echolon program mainly due to the timing.
Seems profits getting a bit more relevant than intelligence to them these days.
Yeah I'd rather go without YouTube than deal with the ads at this point they went ridiculous with it a long time ago.
Isn't the replacement to Echelon, just PRISM? Which yes Google are a part of, along with Meta, Microsoft, etc. As well as the lesser known MUSCULAR program.
Could be I just can't get over the timing of echolon suddenly being called over and Google appearing almost instantly
That said I still use Google just don't trust it really I've always felt it was an intelligence company in truth and probably the echelons replacement.
Firefox for Android, AdBlock, Firefox -> Chrome user agent fake plugin. Works very well without any ads or issues.
This supports PiP which is YouTube premium feature.
I would jump ship instantly to something better if the content would be there.
The Chinese consumers have been eating up ads like that for their TVs to power on for roughly half a decade at least. I'm talking Xiaomi. Chinese consumers are the perfect ad(shit)-eating consumer; so docile and they like to burn money (I mean, they do...literally).
YouTube already has ToS on their API and has paid tiers. But a lot (most?) of the third-party apps and tools bypass the API and directly scrape the site.
I'm sure there's an in-depth reason for it, but there is one that scrapes Old Reddit, instead of the main site, and it works great for me (Stealth on f-droid). There's also RedReader, a client that was allowed to keep API access because of it's accessibility features... which I guess Reddit just couldn't be bothered to implement into their own app.
Go to any major publication, and I mean absolutely any one, and there is a solid chance there is at least a single YT embed.
If they try to Reddit their API they're going to lose much, much more than just giving it away
Google being an ass about alternative YouTube clients is somewhat dumb but they likely prefer to control user experience. They're a for profit entity so it shouldn't be that surprising. Google kicking users that cost them money is not dumb.
Or maybe Google should just improve the experience so people want to pay for a premium subscription. But instead of investing in a better user experience they'd rather intentionally make it worse to drive consumers to pay to unshitify it. But instead they're blowing loads of cash which could be used to invest in the platform and turn even more profit, but they're using it to fight a war with their customers for short term profits. They are dumb.
Yup. I've considered paying for YouTube premium, but:
Nebula gets rid of the ads and sponsorships, and my understanding is creators get a larger cut vs YouTube. Grayjay allows me to follow multiple streaming services and has the volume/brightness management bits as well. I'm willing to pay for both of them because they bring value, YouTube doesn't.
We'll never know since we don't have numbers that Google does. Sadly, that also makes Google the best candidate to determine what's the best strategy for them :p
YouTube already did the math, as did almost every single company and corporation on the planet.
There's a lot more revenue in advertising than subscriptions, especially on a website that started off entirely free (so Netflix for example goes in the subscription model rather than the advertising model but that seems to have changed!)
There's a mass of people who follow up on these advertisements. The latest advertisements I've encountered on YouTube are really really calculated and well scripted. For example the digital dollar advertisements sound like they're going to save you from financial ruin. It's clever and it's working. Money is pouring in.
Or maybe Google should just improve the experience so people want to pay for a premium subscription.
The problem is that YouTube kind of already peaked, you can’t really make something that works well better
I don't think the for profit changes anything necessarily. The problem is size and impossible situations bad worse by bad leadership
Ads have almost always been part and parcel of the YouTube experience. However, there's a point at which ads become so frequent, so irrelevant, and so relentless that they start hurting the user experience. We've been past that point for a while now.
Ironically, without an ad blocker it’s hard to read the Android Police blog. I invite anyone to try.
Eventually, the users will rebel and just stop watching, and then the video creators will follow, because if nobody's watching, then there will be no reason to create on YouTube.
If you can't have some sort of optimism, you might as well just go ahead and commit suicide because life's not worth living.
Yeah, I didn't mean to come off quite that grim, but reading it again. I definitely see where it was a hell of a lot more morbid than I meant it to be.
That's never going to happen unless there's another platform they'll all migrate to and Rumble ain't it.
Why isn't Rumble an option? Genuinely curious. Is it because it's not open source? or federated or something?
Why isn't Rumble an option?
For most people who refuse to use it, it's probably because they view it as more a haven for extremism and hate speech, as it seems to have made its niche by allowing those who were banned elsewhere (not always a bad thing...depends on offense).
Most of Rumble’s prominent accounts are run by individuals, not organizations, and about a quarter have been banned or demonetized on other social media sites. The Center’s study examined 200 prominent accounts on Rumble, selected from those with the most followers. As of June 2022, about eight-in-ten accounts (78%) were individuals while 21% were organizations. About a fifth of these prominent Rumble accounts (22%) have been banned or demonetized on other platforms.
Guns, abortion and LGBTQ issues were among the subjects that prominent Rumble accounts focused on in June 2022. A review of posts from these 200 prominent Rumble accounts found that about half posted about guns and gun rights (49%) or abortion (48%), 44% posted about LGBTQ issues, and 42% posted about the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. These posts came amid widespread discussion of major events and issues that were regularly covered in the news at the time.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/21/key-facts-about-rumble/
Given the giant amounts of storage and bandwidth needed for video hosting... A platform is not a solution. A protocol is.
Allegiance to Google is what's ridiculous, they haven't deserved to exist since their IPO and the parasite they are needs to be pulled off the internet
Name another platform that has anyway near the similar popularity or usability (usability on third party apps)
You can like something and want it to be better. In the lack of actual alternatives the vitriol against YouTube’s anti-user decisions makes a lot of sense. I think you’re just being contrarian.
I'm so addicted to YouTube it's gonna be a very rough time when I can no longer watch without ads, because I'm sure as hell not watching ads.
I stopped paying when they increased the price, for less functionality.
Still paying membership for a couple of youtubers I wanted to support (that don't have patreon, or ko-fi, or stuff like that), but gonna keep using adblocker for as long as I can, since YouTube adds are awful.